Fidelias pushed himself back up and saw Magnus holding the vord’s jaws away from his face with both hands. Magnus wasn’t as strong an earthcrafter as Fidelias was. He was unable to dislodge the vord, and the thing had managed to begin raking at him with its claws as it struggled to clamp the incredible power of its jaws over Magnus’s face.

For an instant, Magnus’s eyes met his.

Fidelias saw the branches of logic in his mind, unfolding as calmly and cleanly as if he’d been performing a theoretical exercise.

The situation was ideal. The vord was already badly wounded. The nearest legionares were already taking up their weapons and charging forward—but they would never arrive in time to save Magnus. Fidelias himself was badly wounded. The shock was keeping him from feeling it, but he knew that even with the attentions of a Legion healer, he’d be off his feet for a few days.

Magnus knew.

No one would be able to blame him for only killing two and a half of three vord. Fidelias would remain hidden. Valiar Marcus’s position would be secure. And to accomplish it, all Fidelias would need to do was... nothing.

Nothing but let one of them, the vord, the foe of every living thing on Carna, rip a trusted confidant of the rightful First Lord of Alera to quivering bits of meat.

And suddenly he was consumed with rage. Rage at the lies and selfish ambition that had poisoned the heart of Alera ever since the death of Gaius Septimus. Rage at Sextus’s stubborn pride, pride that had driven him to turn the Realm into a venomous cauldron of treachery and intrigue. Rage at the things he had been forced to do in the name of his oath to the Crown, and then in supposed service to the greater good of all Alera, when it seemed clear that the man to whom he had sworn his oath had abandoned his own duty to the Realm. Things that boy at the Academy, all those years ago, would be horrified to know were in his future.

It had to stop.

Here, before the greatest threat any of them had ever known, it had to stop.

Valiar Marcus let out a roar of furious defiance and threw himself onto the vord’s back. He jammed an armored forearm between the vord’s jaws, and felt the terrible pressure of its teeth as they clamped down. He ignored it and ripped savagely at the vord’s head with his shoulders, twisting and worrying at the thing like a man trying to rip a stump from the earth.

The vord let out a hiss of rage. It was too sinuous and flexible to let him snap its neck.